Once upon time, Pell Grants, fed­eral loans from the gov­ern­ment, were a great asset to help stu­dents pay for their col­lege edu­ca­tion. How­ever, Kevin Carey, a pol­icy direc­tor at Edu­ca­tion Sec­tor, a D.C.-based think tank argues that this is no longer the case. In a recent arti­cle, he claims Pell Grants are not as ben­e­fi­cial today, given the ris­ing costs of tuition and the lack of any objec­tive, uni­ver­sal sta­tis­tics to eval­u­ate how well col­leges edu­cate students.

He explains that experts in the Edu­ca­tion world approve of Pres­i­dent Obama’s pro­posal to trans­fer more than $40 bil­lion in bank­ing indus­try sub­si­dies to Pell Grants, as this would pro­vide more oppor­tu­ni­ties for low-income stu­dents to obtain the nec­es­sary aid mak­ing the epic quest of attend­ing col­lege a lit­tle more real­is­tic. How­ever, adding more money to the Pell Grant bud­get does not resolve the issue of tuition hikes. And that’s a minor issue when com­pared to this obser­va­tion by Carey:

“The biggest cul­prit is the lack of objec­tive, pub­licly avail­able infor­ma­tion about how well col­leges teach and how much col­lege stu­dents learn. Nobody knows which col­leges really do the best job of tak­ing the stu­dents they enroll and help­ing them learn over the course of four years.”

Tak­ing Carey’s com­ments into con­sid­er­a­tion, what’s at stake for col­leges if they were to par­tic­i­pate in a national exam eval­u­at­ing their abil­ity to edu­cate stu­dents? Brand Equity. Hypo­thet­i­cally speak­ing, let’s say Col­lege A is a famous, large research uni­ver­sity, who has received many acco­lades. Col­lege A, along with many other sim­i­lar schools, decides to par­tic­i­pate in a national assess­ment mea­sur­ing its abil­ity to edu­cate stu­dents across majors. One year later, Col­lege A receives their exam results and the admin­is­tra­tion learns that Col­lege A can do a much bet­ter job of edu­cat­ing its stu­dents. With its rep­u­ta­tion tar­nished, Col­lege A sees lower enroll­ment num­bers, and as a result lower rev­enue. While this exam­ple is a bit extreme, it shows why col­leges would be appre­hen­sive to sub­ject­ing them­selves to said testing.

On the other hand, one might ques­tion the effec­tive­ness of such test­ing. Obvi­ously, there are dif­fer­ent types of learn­ing that extend beyond the class­room. For exam­ple, how could such an exam go about eval­u­at­ing what a stu­dent has learned via an intern­ship or research opportunity?

So, should col­leges be eval­u­ated on their abil­ity to edu­cate stu­dents? Feel free to share your two cents in the com­ment sec­tion below.